"Under the Sign of Scorpion" by Juri - Gnostic Liberation Front

and another 9200 to be imprisoned in a four-month period. But the quotas
were still not satisfactory (Moskovskie Novosti, 21st of June 1992).
A total of 7 million people became new political prisoners in the Soviet
Union during the years 1937-38. At the peak of Stalin's and Kaganovich's
terror, the number of executions reached 40 000 per month, according to
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who estimated the total figure of those executed
in the years 1937-38 at one million and assessed that another two million
died in the work camps. Literaturnaya Rossiya published the largest
estimate of the total number of victims of the Soviet regime, including
those who died of induced starvation and maltreatment - 147 million.
This came to nearly 5 million per year for 30 years, though the years 1937-
38 accounted for a disproportionate amount of deaths. I must point out
here that many of those murdered were women and children who had been
classed as "enemies of the people". The systematic killing of large
numbers of children began as early as 1934. After all, they cost money...
In Moscow, the murders were carried out in the prison dungeons of the
Lubyanka, the Butyrka and the Lefortovo. Stalin and Kaganovich had their
most famous victims cremated at night, following which they had the ash
smuggled out and buried in a mass grave in the Donskoye graveyard. This
seemed the safest way to complete the total elimination of their important
victims.
Far from all of those killed in the jails of Moscow during the 1930s, the
1940s and the beginning of the 1950s were cremated. Most of them were
thrown into various mass graves in Moscow. One of those hitherto un-
known mass graves was found in the Kalitinsky graveyard in southern
Moscow. The NKVD used it as a dumping site for bodies for several years
in the 1930s.
The covered lorries arrived at around five in the afternoon, every single
day for seven years between 1934 an 1941. They drove up to the far end of
a ravine, turned around and reversed up to the edge. The trucks were
painted blue-green and lacked side-windows. Instead, large letters on the
sides of the truck announced SAUSAGES or MEAT and sometimes
CAKES. When the truck had backed up to the edge and stopped, a hatch
was opened at the back and two officers wearing NKVD uniforms, rubber
boots, long rubber aprons in black and gold and elbow-length rubber
gloves seized the corpses by the heads and legs and threw them down into
the ravine. Two other soldiers waited down below with shovels and threw
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